DeGarido Architecture is the Grid Network's answer to the housing question, and it is the reason most Grids do not need streets. A DeGarido unit is a factory-made, modular, self-sufficient building that ships in sections, assembles on site, and unpacks back into sections when a community decides to move. Calling them houses undersells them; most of them are closer to mansion-scale community centres than to single-family dwellings. A small cluster of DeGarido units can carry an entire Grid's social life without any of the road-grid sprawl the twentieth century took for granted.
What they are ¶
The standard unit is a large, pod-linked structure built to the Modularity spec — walls, floors, and utilities that can be swapped out without demolition, and a set of interchangeable hobby-unit rooms that residents reconfigure for their own lives. The exterior is designed to sit inside the Honeycomb geometry: large-footprint polygons that cluster cleanly against neighbours, share structural mass, and carry a Grid Dome shell over the top when the settlement needs sealing.
Power, water, and data hook into the Grid's Wireless Power field and local utility layer at the assembly stage. A DeGarido unit is technically self-sufficient — a Grid could plant one of these in a field without utility hookups and the unit would still function — which is the reason this type became the default rather than a niche product.
The transition ¶
The word "DeGarido" sits as a nod toward the named architect-tradition that invented the first working modular units during the transition from old-world suburbia to Grid-form settlement. In the old plan, a house sat on a lot forever. In the DeGarido plan, a house is one configuration of a settlement, and the next settlement is the same house rearranged. The shift — from "where is my building?" to "what state is my building currently in?" — is the one that let communities move, merge, and split without the old-world cost of new construction every time.
The community dimension ¶
A DeGarido unit is designed to host more than its residents. Big shared spaces inside the unit serve as the Grid's de facto community centre: meals, classes, birthday parties, blueprint-show-and-tell. A Grid with three or four DeGarido units often runs its governance out of them rather than out of a separate civic building. That is why the model ended up described as "less of a need for grid-like streets" — the building itself absorbs most of the public functions the old city needed a separate street grid to connect.
Why it matters ¶
DeGarido Architecture is the housing implementation of the rest of the Grid build. Without something like it, the honeycomb would be a theoretical pattern that housing markets quietly ignored. With it, the pattern ships in crates and rises into a neighbourhood in weeks — and when the neighbourhood is done, it packs down and goes wherever the community wants to be next.